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The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) conducts peer reviews of individual members once every five to six years. Reviews seek to improve the quality and effectiveness of members’ development co-operation, highlighting good practices and recommending improvements. The United States has led with substantial ODA contributions in response to multiple crises. Twenty-one US government agencies programme and deliver foreign assistance. USAID systematically incorporates collaboration, learning and adapting in its programme cycle and works to increase diversity, equity and inclusion by championing locally-led approaches. This peer review provides a set of recommendations for the United States to mitigate negative transboundary effects of its policies, promote more flexible budget appropriations in line with needs, equip its development finance institution to deliver and adopt a clearer approach to multilateral partnerships. It recommends that the United States puts development effectiveness at the heart of localisation, reinforce human resources, and consider conflict prevention in all country programmes.

Successive crises including COVID-19, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the climate emergency are exacerbating inequalities between and within countries and stifling progress to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement. While developed countries deployed historic stimulus packages to build back better, developing countries lacked fiscal and monetary buffers to respond. Countries with the fewest resources face challenging trade-offs between short-term rescue and long-term financing for a sustainable recovery. The SDG financing gap in developing countries grew due to a drop in available resources called upon in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda coupled with rising financing needs. Official Development Assistance (ODA), or aid, played an important role to help narrow the gap, but could not do so on its own. Global crises open a window of opportunity for SDG alignment of broader resources to narrow the gap. Growing trillions in developed countries aim to reduce risks, including environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. However, resources are not reaching the countries most in need. Urgent action is needed to remove bottlenecks for a more equitable and needs-based allocation of sustainable finance.

This report provides disaggregated data analysis of climate finance provided and mobilised in 2016-2020 across climate finance components, themes, sectors, and financial instruments. It also explores key trends and provides insight relating to the distribution and concentration of climate finance provided and mobilised across different developing country characteristics and groupings. The concluding chapter of the report provides further insights on the impacts and effectiveness of climate finance, as well as meaningful mitigation action and transparency on implementation. The findings complement the OECD report Aggregate Trends of Climate Finance Provided and Mobilised by Developed Countries in 2013-2020.

States of Fragility 2022 arrives during an ‘age of crises’, where multiple, concurring crises are disproportionately affecting the 60 fragile contexts identified in this year’s report. Chief among these crises are COVID-19, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and climate change, with the root causes of multidimensional fragility playing a central role in shaping their scale and severity. The report outlines the state of fragility in 2022, reviews current responses to it, and presents options to guide better policies for better lives in fragile contexts. At the halfway point of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it is more critical than ever for development partners to focus on the furthest behind: the 1.9 billion people in fragile contexts that account for 24% of the world’s population but 73% of the world’s extreme poor.

Meeting the Paris Agreement goals will need a rapid acceleration of finance towards clean energy investments in emerging and developing economies. Blended finance is an important tool that can help mobilise commercial investment towards clean energy, whilst preserving scarce public resources for wider climate and development objectives. A systematic approach to the deployment of blended finance – that tailors instruments to the nature of underlying barriers to commercial investment, minimises concessionality, has a clear exit strategy, and is co-ordinated within a wider ecosystem of support and enabling measures – can help maximise its development impact and stimulate private sector development. This paper explores specific features of clean energy projects, and the wider transition, to draw lessons for donors, policymakers in beneficiary governments, and financial institutions on whether and how best to deploy blended finance in the sector. It revisits the OECD DAC's Blended Finance Principles, specifically Principle 2: designing blended finance to increase the mobilisation of commercial finance, and explores their applicability to clean energy. It also explores sector-specific considerations for the deployment of clean energy, setting out the considerations development practitioners can make to inform better decision-making on, and maximise the development impact of, blended finance interventions.

The TOSSD statistical framework aims to provide a complete picture of all official resources flowing into developing countries for their sustainable development, providing reliable, comparable and transparent data. This working paper compares the TOSSD data for the year 2019 with datasets collected by three countries: Bangladesh, Cameroon and Colombia. The study explores similarities and differences between the TOSSD data and the data collected at the local level, and provides recommendations on how to improve data completeness and accuracy. It also suggests how a data validation mechanism for TOSSD could work, allowing recipient countries to provide timely feedback.